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Category Archives: Capacity

73 Democratic members of Congress signed
a letter
drafted by telco and cableco lobbyists against net neutrality.
Save the Internet has sufficiently fisked it.
My favorite point is that when AT&T was required as a condition
of acquiring Bellsouth in 2006 to abide by net neutrality,
it increased its infrastructure investments.
As soon as that two year requirement was up,
so were the investments.
(And they didn’t even honor all the requirements,
such as
a low-end $10/month service.)

We can let the telcos and cablecos continue to turn the Internet into cable TV,
as they have said they want to do.
Under the conditions they want, we never would have had the
world wide web, google, YouTube, flickr, facebook, etc.

And left to their plan, the duopoly will continue
cherry-picking densely-populated areas and
leaving rural areas,
such as south Georgia, where I live, to sink or swim.
Most of the white area in the Georgia map never had anybody even
try a speed test.
Most of the rest of south Georgia had really slow access.
Which maybe wouldn’t be a problem if we had competitive newspapers
(we don’t) or competing TV stations (we don’t).
Or if we didn’t need to publish public information like health care
details online, as Sanford Bishop (D GA-02) says he plans to do.
How many people in his district can even get to it?
How many won’t because their link is too slow?
How many could but won’t because it costs too much?

John Barrow (D GA-12) has
a fancy flashy home page that most people in his district probably can’t get to.
Yet he signed the letter against net neutrality.

Question from a provider: VoIP traffic prioritization from essentially our own service?

Moderator: One thing that won’t be allowed is prioritizing your own service
over someone else’s similar service; that’s almost the whole point.
FCC person: This is contemplated in the document. Existing services
wouldn’t have to be reworked rapidly.
Seeking input.
Reasons to be concerned.
Monopoly over last mile has a position to differentially treat such a service.
This is one of the core concerns.

Q: Giving the same priority to somebody else’s similar VoIP service
is essentially creating a trust relationship; how much traffic
will the other service provider send?
Continue reading →

Permitting long distance service to be given away is not in the public interest.

In other words, if the telcos couldn’t make money off of it, nobody should.

A usually reliable source says:

The ACTA petition was the first time that the FCC confronted VoIP as a
policy issue. The FCC, however, never acted on the ACTA petition, and
ACTA, the moving party, no longer exists. The question presented by the
ACTA petition was whether the FCC had regulatory authority to regulate
VoIP Internet software used by individuals to do telephony with each
other, with no service provider in the middle.

It’s interesting that the same telcos that now rail against regulation
were happy to try to use it back in 1995 when it suit their purposes.

So ATCA failed to control VoIP via FCC regulation.
But they can use
volume charging
to eliminate both VoIP and video they don’t provide themselves.

The duopoly’s claims of a few people using too much traffic
are a smokescreen.
The real issue is control:
they want to control what passes through “their” networks
so they can profit by as much of it as possible.
I have no objection to telcos and cablecos making a profit.
I do object to them squelching everybody else to do so.
On the Internet you can connect any two tin cans,
unless the duopoly can cut your string.

Metered Internet access is a fact of life for many broadband users
around the world, but has been largely a nonfactor when it comes to
wired broadband in the US. That may change, according to a memo leaked
to the Broadband
Reports forums. If the memo is to be believed, Time Warner Cable
will be rolling out what it calls "Consumption Based Billing"
on a trial basis in the Beaumont, Texas area.

Under the proposed scheme, new customers will be able to choose from a
couple of different plans with varying bandwidth caps. They'll be
given online tools to monitor usage and will be able to upgrade to the
next higher tier of service to avoid charges for exceeding their monthly
bandwidth limit. If the trial works well, Time Warner would then roll out
bandwidth caps to current customers: "We will use the results of the
trial to evaluate results for possible future nationwide rollouts,"
reads the memo.

Bandwidth caps have been a sore subject for some users who have
found themselves bumping into mysterious, undefined limits. This
past fall, a number of Comcast subscribers complained that their service
was cut off after having reached Comcast's bandwidth limit.

If the memo is legitimate, it’s good that Time Warner is going for
more transparency.
Although if they want transparency, why don’t they just come out
and announce what they’re doing?
Continue reading →

Such activity apparently includes moving large files, which is ironic
for users who have paid for unlimited access. Perhaps more than ironic;
I wonder if anybody has tried suing yet.

Well, I don’t know about Comcast, but somebody has tried suing Verizon,
and won:

Attorney General Andrew M. Cuomo today announced that Verizon Wireless
has agreed to halt the deceptive marketing of its internet usage plans
and reimburse $1 million to customers for wrongful account termination
nationwide.

The settlement follows a nine-month investigation into the marketing
of NationalAccess and BroadbandAccess plans for wireless access to the
internet for laptop computer users. Attorney General’s investigation
found that Verizon Wireless prominently marketed these plans as
“’Unlimited,” without disclosing that common usages such as
downloading movies or playing games online were prohibited. The company
also cut off heavy internet users for exceeding an undisclosed cap of
usage per month. As a result, customers misled by the company’s claims,
enrolled in its Unlimited plans, only to have their accounts abruptly
terminated for excessive use, leaving them without internet services
and unable to obtain refunds.

And Cuomo goes out of his way to say he wants this to affect
not just Verizon:

“This settlement sends a message to companies large and small answering the growing consumer demand for wireless services. When consumers are promised an ‘unlimited’ service, they do not expect the promise to be broken by hidden limitations,” said Attorney General Andrew Cuomo. “Consumers must be treated fairly and honestly. Delivering a product is simply not enough – the promises must be delivered
as well.”

Google may be getting into international infrastructure as well as domestic:

Google is planning a multi-terabit undersea communications cable across
the Pacific Ocean for launch in 2009, Communications Day has learned.

The Unity cable has been under development for several months, with a
group of carriers and Google meeting for high-level talks on the plan
in Sydney last week.

Google would not strictly confirm or deny the existence of the Unity
plan today, with spokesman Barry Schnitt telling our North American
correspondent Patrick Neighly that “Additional infrastructure for the
Internet is good for users and there are a number of proposals to add
a Pacific submarine cable. We’re not commenting on any of these plans.”

However, Communications Day understands that Unity would see Google
join with other carriers to build a new multi-terabit cable. Google
would get access to a fibre pair at build cost handing it a tremendous
cost advantage over rivals such as MSN and Yahoo, and also potentially
enabling it to peer with Asia ISPs behind their international gateways
– considerably improving the affordability of Internet services across
Asia Pacific.

Just when you think it’s all telcos doing things dire for Internet freedom:

Comcast has warned broadband Internet customers across the country to
curb their downloading or wind up on the curb.

The company has a bandwidth limitation that, if broken, can result in
a 12-month suspension of service. The problem, according to customer
complaints, is that the telecom giant refuses to reveal how much
downloading is too much.

The company, which a few years ago advertised the service as
“unlimited” has an “acceptable use policy” which enforces the
invisible download limit.

The 23-part policy, states that it is a breach of contract to generate
“levels of traffic sufficient to impede others’ ability to send or
retrieve information.” But nowhere does it detail what levels of
traffic will impede others.

And you have to wonder how long that AUP said that while Comcast
was advertising “unlimited”.

This part is especially enlightening:

Douglas said the company shuts off people’s Internet if it affects the
performance of their neighbors because often many people will share a
connection on one data pipe.

So instead of fixing their bad topology, they penalize customers for using it.

Well, it’s a free market, right?
Comcast users who don’t like it can switch to, er, if they’re lucky
and have any choice at all, probably to whichever of Verizon or AT&T
happens to be in their area.
There couldn’t be any problems with those providers, could there?

Meanwhile, if you want to follow this Comcast controversy,
here’s the
Comcast Broadband dispute
blog that one of the cast-offs started, presumably using his new DSL connection.It’s kind of like salmon organizing against a dam upstream.

Deployed troops can still post their videos to YouTube, despite the recently announced Pentagon ban against accessing that site and ten others from government computers. The trick, says Rear Admiral Elizabeth Hight, is to use your own internet access or visit one of the rec center internet cafes, which plug into separate, commercial networks. The ban, she says, applies only to the 5 million computers worldwide connected to the official Department of Defense intranet.